2010

Each year at this time I honour Dr John Whitman Ray,
who died on April 21, 2001, by publicly reflecting on what we have learned
from him in the hope that this may help us hold better to what we know is
right. This brings me immediately to the point: “Consistency, thou art a
gem.” John was often apt to say it, but it seems to me that with the
passing years he would say it more and more frequently. The turtle and the
hare tell us the same story, “The race is not to the swift, but to those who
endure to the end.” “Sure,” I thought, “it is all about consistency,” but
only now, ten or more years down the track in my own life do I start to
realise the significance of these words, as measured by the consequences of not being consistent.

One of the few constants in Body Electronics is change;
in fact I dare say that change is what most are in it for. With this
motivation as the starting precept, perhaps it is no surprise that people
“change” and move on to other things. These changes may be because of a
growth in awareness or a growth in readiness to move up to the next level of
commitment and attainment. There may also be change in the form of reduced awareness and identification with a pre-programmed pattern to
continually try something new or different, rather than persist with the
current plan or path to its conclusion.

And so I begin to realise that the challenge in life is
not so much in finding our true path, which I assumed to be the case in my
first 30 or so years. Rather, the greater challenge may be to keep the path
in sight once we find it, to “hold fast that which is true.”

Only through experience can I now say that finding the
true path is the easy part. As a university student living at home and
working part-time I thought life was fairly complex. I worked hard and
played hard but on the whole I had the sense that life should be easier.
What I did not realise was that this was merely training for harder work
ahead because of a small thing called commitment.

To outline some of the innocent looking commitments I
eventually took on – there was owning a house, getting married, and having
children. Not that I took any of these lightly – I do few things without a
great deal of thought and introspection – but nonetheless, in spite of all
my estimation as to the gravity of these commitments I had but scratched the
surface – a necessary and meaningful scratch, but a scratch nonetheless.

Why do I point these things out? To illustrate the
true nature of commitment.

A commitment is not just an agreement or a promise –
this is superficial thinking. At its simplest and most meaningful level, a
commitment is a sacrifice, a sacrifice of freedom to do whatever and
whenever according to one’s own will and desire. Creation is a commitment –
out of all the things that potentially could be – one thing is,
by choice to exclude all other things. Creation and duality are all about
commitment.

Let’s not think of sacrifice as bad because it limits a
freedom, because so long as the sacrifice itself was freely chosen and we
retain the capacity to remain aware of all that transpires within and
because of that sacrifice (commitment) – in other words, while we continue
to lovingly and willingly endure all things without resistance – then
freedom is actually preserved. In fact, it’s just another duality – the
creation of restriction co-creates freedom, its polar opposite. Problems
only ever arise if we resist the restriction (creation) and thus cannot
encompass the duality. If there is enough resistance we can even lose sight
of the duality and therefore lose our ability to encompass it. No matter
how much resistance and resulting lack of awareness there is, and no matter
how great the restriction may appear, freedom is never gone – it can’t leave
us, it is simply impossible for us to lose our freedom because every act of
restriction must have freedom within it, ever presently. The problem only
ever is our fixation on the restriction, never the lack of freedom. Having
said this, for completeness we should also consider the exception of certain
violations of Law that place us out of reach of our freedom until such time
as we are willing and able to pay the price of restitution to Law.

So you may reason, “If a commitment is a sacrifice,
sacrifice is a loss of freedom, but freedom can never be lost, then surely
commitment is not much of a sacrifice.” Although this may appear sound, the
commitment would be a poor one, not much of a commitment, if no sacrifice
was involved – it would be more of a convenience really. Sadly, many
so-called commitments are exactly this – convenience, wherein it suits
someone to behave in a certain way and so they say they are “committed to
it,” which they generally are, right up until something else suits them
better. There is no commitment without sacrifice.

Since any sacrifice has freedom inherent within it as
the other side of the duality, any perceived loss can be unmade at any time.
This is not to trivialise sacrifice, for the operative principle is intent
to honour the commitment, whatever, hence the sacrifice. For example, a
marriage commitment involves forsaking a large number of things, perhaps
Friday night bowling with your friends. More seriously, marriage is a
sacrifice of choice of lovers, which again sadly is often seen more as a
matter of convenience and therefore not commitment. You commit to spending
a large amount of time with one person and to engaging with them in a
partnership to be constructive in each other’s progress, sometimes at
personal expense. Is marriage worth it? You’d have to ask the married
couple because the answer will vary. What people who’ve been married for a
long time successfully will tell you, is that you get out what you put in.
Marriage is hard work, but fulfillingly so, or not hard work and therefore
more a matter of convenience.

Having children is (or should be) a commitment. Being
a parent is not just sharing your DNA with someone, although science is
inclined to reduce it to that. Being a parent involves a lot of time,
energy, patience, (let’s not forget money), frustration… and love, a lot of
love, more love than I previously realised existed..

What I personally didn’t realise is that each child is a commitment. I had this idea that “children” are a commitment –
oh no, each and every child is its whole own wonderfully complex commitment.

Even the idea of owning a house scared me for many
years. I wasn’t afraid of the house, or the debt, but the commitment – ok,
debt was in there somewhere. I didn’t want a house because I perceived it
as a loss of freedom – freedom to go wherever I wanted whenever I wanted.
Only through long months of meditation did I finally realise that the
commitment of owning a house wasn’t just a sacrifice, it was a freedom too –
the freedom of having a base from which to go wherever I wanted whenever I
wanted! The difference between a scary commitment/sacrifice and a
marvellous sense of freedom was only a thought away.

Let us also briefly consider the primary blessing of
commitment, in that it fits one to receive a spiritual understanding that
can come in no other way. The commitment may give a service to another or
express faith in some principle and in these ways is one fitted to receive.

No commitment should be entered into lightly. If it is
I’d suggest it is a convenience and not a commitment. There is no blessing
in convenience, just perpetuation of a comfort zone and thus no spiritual
progress. Comfort and convenience are sometimes the order of the day – no
problem – but if they become a way of life at the expense of making a
genuine commitment then there can be no meaningful progress.

A particular lifestyle or diet can be a commitment.
It’s a sacrifice because you choose not to eat a certain food you may enjoy
because you believe it is a correct principle not to eat that thing. Maybe
you don’t eat meat or you don’t drink coffee or don’t smoke because you
believe it is better for you not to do those things (the blessing), even
though you might enjoy or even crave them. If it is not a commitment and
only convenience then as soon as you feel like a coffee and the opportunity
arises, you’ll just have one, now out of accord with what you consider to be
the correct principle. No correct principle, no commitment to correct
principle, no progress.

This has been self-evident to me for many years. One
thing I did not realise before making many such commitments and one thing I
now understand to be pivotally important is that each person has a certain
capacity for the number or type of commitments they can meaningfully make.
This capacity increases over time with successful experience regarding their
commitments. When I think back to the university days when I thought I had
it tough, I now see that I never had it so good.

The reason it is so important to understand that you
only have a certain capacity to make meaningful commitments is that if you
overextend yourself beyond your capacity to keep your commitments you can
begin to fail in them. Failure in any commitment is twice a problem – once
because you have lost what you set out to achieve, but secondly because it
can undermine your confidence to make a similar commitment to make the
progress you desire. This is why The List always points us to the
simple things regarding commitments. If you haven’t considered The List
this way before, every item on it is a commitment – it will be an act of
creation or uncreation on your part. Every item of karma requires a
commitment to complete that which you have started.

The consequence of over-commitment can also be losing
sight of one’s path. For example, let’s say you commit to not smoking
cigarettes but you crave them. As you abstain, over time your mind becomes
clearer, the craving recedes and you realise all sorts of things about the
detrimental effects of your former habit that never occurred to you before
(often even though people kept telling you about them) – your clothes used
to stink of smoke, you couldn’t taste your food properly, the cigarettes
controlled you, dictated your day, they caused a persistent low-level cough
or asthma, certain people used to avoid you, your car, clothes and house
were full of ash, you were poisoned with heavy metals, you couldn’t think
straight without a cigarette and you couldn’t think at all after having one
(not that you saw it that way at the time) – in short there was a perpetual
cloud of smoke in your brain and you just couldn’t see the forest for the
trees.

Okay. “All good reasons for never smoking again,” you
decide. But is it a commitment or convenience? How long will your
commitment last? Let’s give you the benefit of the doubt and call it a
genuine commitment. It so happens this is not your only commitment. You
have a wife, six kids, two mortgages, a demanding job – enough to drive
anyone to smoke. Just once. Once didn’t hurt, maybe just one more time and
before you know it, all that mental clarity you gained by not smoking is
gone and you can’t even remember why you thought smoking was such a big
deal. Now you’re trapped again and have lost sight of a path that isn’t
really too hard to find – just hard to commit to.

The real problem here isn’t the smoking or the
drinking, or the overeating or the infidelity or whatever, the problem is
committing to more or bigger things than you can be successful in at this
time. (As an aside, this is also a key consideration when giving advice as
a practitioner.) By this I do not mean to set your sights lower, but to
make each commitment a very deliberate thought process and decision, because
taking on a new thing over here may cause a pressure point over there. The
risk is in failing in the complexity of what you’ve taken on before having
acquired the capacity to do it all at once. Failure in a commitment reduces
your capacity to recommit – the reactive mechanism is strengthened and you
may even lose sight of the path, the desire to make progress in a certain
area.

The solution lies in the discipline of The List in
progressing from simple commitment to next simple commitment until you build
powerful capacity to be successful in significant commitments.

In other words, only by keeping to your path, even in
some simplistic way, can you keep sight of the path. It is when you turn
your back on your path that you lose sight of it and without that path you
begin to flounder and holding to your commitments becomes increasingly
difficult. It may be that by not servicing your commitments – not being
true to them – that you become incapable of discerning the path. For
example, alcohol, meat, drugs, tobacco, excessive sex, stimulants and
painkillers of all kinds dull the senses and take away the clarity of mind
that enables you to focus on your commitments and be successful and faithful
in them.

They make it harder to exact the discipline required to
avoid continually acting according to your reactive programming, which will always act to maintain you in a comfort zone such that you cannot
progress to a point of consciousness change. In other words, this is the
path of involution towards total unconsciousness that John spoke of. “The
price of freedom,” he said, “is eternal vigilance,” meaning that it is not
enough to know what your path is, you must walk it, otherwise you will lose
your way. There is no middle ground here – without demonstrated active
commitment to progress there will be inevitable backwards movement.

To think of it another way, our minds have been
programmed for darkness ever since we first chose to reject the Light, as is
the case with the vast majority of mankind. We have already in action a
momentum of involution and an environment of involution. To move against
these two currents requires more than standing still; to stand still is to
be swept along by the current. There must be a discipline to move forward
through holding and acting on a commitment in order to progress.

Why do I point this out at this time?

For many of us who knew him, John was a huge
inspiration to be brave and to make and keep our commitments and to expand
our capacity to make further progress. In times gone by he would have
referred to this as “magnifying your responsibilities,” an old scriptural
principle.

However, with John’s passing and with each passing year
some have found a lack of external inspiration and become gradually less
resolute. It’s insidious – give a little way here, a little there, and we
soon don’t even recall why we were trying to do a certain thing, let alone
work on it. John never intended to be a guru, a figurehead, or someone
special on a pedestal, although plenty tried to put him there. John wanted
us to learn how to do it for ourselves. Sure, he pushed us and some of us
needed a good hard push at times. But we have a choice, we always have had
and always will. Freedom is always available to us and always was, but we
have to work hard because of the position we have put ourselves in.

The principles are actually very clear, the path is
very clear, we are all capable of seeing it and progressing along it, but it
won’t happen without us doing it, and it won’t keep happening if we are
half-hearted because half-heartedness will betray us and allow us to do the
things that defile us, making it harder to proceed with clarity. Things
often seem hard until we realise (decide) they are easy. Simplicity and the
elegant solution are only ever a thought away.

So, what are you doing in your life right now that is
helping you to see more clearly? What are you doing right now that is
making it harder to see more clearly? With these two questions in mind, we
in fact all know exactly what to do, beginning with the simplest step we can
think of in the right direction.

Once again, thanks John for the principles and not
sparing the rod, but let each and every one of us put them to work. The
path is not so hard to find – but we must walk it of our own volition if we
are to reach our destination.

In Love, Light and Perfection,
"I AM"
Graham Bennett

The List is without a doubt the greatest single tool in
anyone’s consciousness change toolkit. Read more about it in John’s Logic in Sequence Book 1, chapter 11, or in my book, The List, the
Art of Constructive Manifestation, available to order here.

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